I have been busy pushing out features for 22books and I wanted to talk about a couple of them. I don't want to just pimp my projects on this blog, I want to talk about why I did certain things and the rational behind the decisions and features.
The first new feature that I think is pretty interesting is that we are now allowing users to enter their own Amazon Associates ID and have that ID used on their lists. Any books bought through Amazon from your lists will credit your Amazon account and not ours. The idea for this came from Kevin Fricovsky and when he first suggested it to me I thought it was crazy. My only source of revenue for 22books is through Amazon Associates and this feature seems to short circuit that source of revenue. Then I started to think about it. The people who normally have Amazon Associates IDs are the influentials and bloggers whose support could help 22books tremendously. I know that the majority of 22books users probably won't enter an associates ID, and I am perfectly willing to trade the revenue of the lists created by those influentials for their work and support. I think this is similar to the approach Jason Calacanis takes, reward your top contributors and they will reward you.
The second big feature is the ability to easily share a list on your blog or site. This is a feature that I have high hopes for as I feel it really increases the usefulness of 22books and should also help to lead more people to 22books. While developing this feature I wanted to make it as easy as possible to share a list, so I ripped off the site that did it the best in my opinion: youtube. Youtube took off because it was so easy to take a video and embed it with your site or blog and I wanted to make it just as easy to embed a book list (although I don't have any delusions that people will want to share book lists as much as youtube videos). Here is the simple UI I went with:
A user can copy and paste the code from the embed textbox and be ready to go. Users can also click customize and change some settings and see a live preview. I was also on the fence on how to do the actual sharing, I decided to go with javascript but I might re-visit that in the future and offer a flash version as well. Here is a small sample of an embedded list (the books I have read so far this year):
I have also deployed a new 22books blog (using simplelog!) that includes an rss feed where I will blog about interesting new lists and new site features. Check it out here.
-James